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RESEARCH--A New Look At Age Graded Performances

Ed Whitlock ran a 2:54 marathon at age 73,and a 3:56 at 85.

Many Lifetime Runners are
accustomed to evaluating their race times with the widely-used and excellent World Masters Association age-graded system.
There are many versions of this calculator around the web, and they are
sometimes included in computerized road-race results.

There is another
less-well-known system, created by Ray Fair, a retired Yale University
economist who has run 39 of 41 New Haven 20K road races, missing the event only
when ill or injured. Fair, 75, recently updated his system--an update covered by the New York Times.
An abstract of his new paper, published by The Review of Economics and
Statistics, is available here.

However, Fair’s approach
makes it easier to “visualize” your future running self. You can look at his
aging factors, from age 40 to age 95, and see how much slower you’ll be at any
age and every distance. (Fair finds no reason to distinguish between rate of 5K
slowing and rate of marathon slowing, as they’re virtually the same. Until there's data to indicate otherwise, the Fair calculator also assumes that women will slow at the same rate/year as men.)

The Fair calculator is particularly useful if you want to determine where you will be in a few years. Let's assume you're 66 and curious about your chances to kick butt when you hit 70, your next age group. Just input your current time and age, and you'll receive your equivalent time at 70. Warning: You'll have to maintain your current training.

Here’s the Ray Fair calculator page, and just below, you can see what it looks like. You will quickly note its simplicity. Simply input a time (no distance required),
and the age when you achieved that time. The Calculator will return your
equivalent times for every age from 40 to 95.

The Calculator page also provides all the Ray Fair age factors, which we have reproduced below. Fair believes there is no performance loss to age 35, and only a 1 percent loss from age 35 to 39.